Don Marti

Wed 10 Nov 2010 09:32:10 AM PST

Corporate Training Rule for language adoption

David N. Welton covers the economics of programming languages.

One more factor for success: the one week training rule.

A new language succeeds if the tools/training/publications industry around it can make a credible case that a manager can take existing programmers who know some other language, send them to a one-week training class, and have them working in the new language. (Of course most of these arguments are bogus, and people end up not using features of the new language, but still. That's how it works.)

C++ was an OO language for C programmers with a little extra training. Same with Java and C++ programmers.

PHP and JavaScript? "You already know HTML, now just learn this one extra thing to make real programs!"

And Microsoft is still selling a distant descendant of BASIC, separated from the original by decades of one-week trainable increments.